CIO Martha Hellerhttps://www.cio.com
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796288How to make the most of meetings between IT and your business partnersWed, 16 May 2018 03:15:00 -0700Martha HellerMartha Heller

When Sanjay Shringarpure joined E. & J. Gallo Winery as CIO in 2015, he was curious about the cadence of the business.

“I wanted to know what our cycles were for budgeting, sales and production, so that IT could develop a matching rhythm,” he says.

He knew that if the company were in harvest mode, for example, the marketing department’s IT requests would not be prioritized. Or if the company were focused on marketing, the supply chain department’s IT resource needs might be overlooked.

Once he had a clear sense of business’s cycles, he built an IT meeting schedule that would align to those cycles. He started out with a CIO staff meeting, which now meets every week for three hours on Monday afternoons.

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IT LeadershipCIO RoleRelationship Building and NetworkingCIOs on the move and in the newsTue, 01 May 2018 09:56:00 -0700Martha HellerMartha Heller

Movers & Shakers is where you can keep up with new CIO appointments and gain valuable insight into the job market and CIO hiring trends. As every company becomes a technology company, CEOs and corporate boards are seeking multi-dimensional CIOs with superior skills in technology, communications, business strategy and digital innovation. The role is more challenging than ever before — but even more exciting and rewarding! If you have CIO job news to share, please email me!

Over the past few months, I’ve responded to a number of interview and webinar requests about the impact of digital technologies on the CIO role and the skills that tomorrow’s transformational CIOs should develop today. I’ve decided to corral my sprawling thoughts into one short Q&A for your convenience and reading pleasure.

What does it mean to be a “digital CIO”?

To be a digital CIO is to understand that digital is a team sport. It is not something that one executive, no matter how influential, can drive alone. A digital transformation so thoroughly changes the foundations of the company that everybody, including the CEO, CIO, COO, and heads of marketing, supply chain, and HR, all need to drive that transformation together.

For most of its 160 years, Northwestern Mutual had succeeded by using technology primarily to conduct its back-office functions, streamline its processes and create operational efficiencies — always supporting the work of its corporate office teams and its nationwide network of world-class financial advisors.

Several years ago, though, company leaders recognized that the wave of digital transformation that was revolutionizing and disrupting almost every industry was leading to a change in client needs and expectations — and to stay relevant in the decades ahead, it would need to change. That sparked a drive toward digital innovation and transformation, one that has involved every function in the company, with IT as a driving force.

Once you’ve pulled all of the traditional levers of productivity and you are stagnating at 1 percent annual productivity gains, where do you go? For oil and gas giant Baker Hughes, a GE company (BHGE), the answer is digital industrial leadership. Jennifer Hartsock, CIO, explains how she uses a product management model and strong business partnership to leverage data and analytics for real business outcomes.

What is “digital industrial leadership”?

Digital industrial leadership is transforming the industrial world. For BHGE, specifically, data and analytics are fundamentally changing the way work gets done in our business and in the oil and gas industry as we prepare for the next big step-change in productivity.

During my first conversation with Fletcher Previn, IBM’s CIO, he told me that his approach to IT is to “lead with design.” I followed up for a full interview and learned that key to Previn’s “design first” philosophy is embedding design and user research deeply into IT, organizing into small nimble teams, defining the metrics that matter, and driving agile at scale.

As CIO of IBM, your philosophy is to “lead with design.” What do you mean by that?

Fletcher Previn: Our mission as an IT organization is to create a productive environment for IBM employees. We do that by leading with design to drive simplicity and ease of use. I believe that the state of your IT landscape is a daily reflection of what you, as an IT organization, think and feel about your employees. So, we’ve made visual and user experience design teams a critical part of IT. These teams act as a cross-functional department that apply user experience (UX) expertise into everything we do, and they create the end-to-end user experiences our employees interact with every day.

We all know that talent makes or breaks us, but how much time do we devote to talent management? When Andy Newsom, senior vice president and CIO of $6.9 billion global life sciences company CSL Behring, told me he allots at least 15 percent of his time on formal talent management, I asked him to tell me more.

When did you start your talent management program?

I have been with CSL Behring for 33 years. When I became CIO seven years ago, we were a federated IT organization with seven IT teams each reporting to one of seven site general managers. I brought all of those teams together into one enterprise IT organization, which meant we now needed a different kind of talent; we needed people who could lead at the global enterprise level.

What is digital leadership? Ask a different CIO; get a different answer. Digital leadership can mean anything from developing products, to modernizing the stack, to changing the culture.

When I asked Justin Mennen, CIO and chief digital officer (CDO) of CompuCom, what digital leadership means to him, he told me about CompuCom’s new digital business unit, how he is elevating the digital experiences of his customers, and his P&L leadership role.

How do you define your role at CompuCom?

I function both as the CIO, leading our technology services organization, and as the CDO and leader of our CompuCom Digital business unit. We launched the new digital business in 2017 to help our customers drive innovation and digital transformation.

The perennial problem facing IT: How do we make our IT organizations more knowledgeable about our business? A close corollary: How do we make the business people we import into the CIO’s organization, more knowledgeable about IT?

Brad Clay, CIO of Lexmark, which delivers printing, imaging, and software solutions, has found an answer to both questions.

Clay joined Lexmark in 2002 and worked in supply chain, IT, and finance for 14 years before becoming CIO in 2016. He inherited a strong IT team, but he saw room for improvement in IT’s relationship with its business partners, particularly with sales and marketing. So, Clay decided to fill some key IT leadership positions with people currently serving in business functions outside of IT.

When Chad Couch joined Brightstar as CIO in 2014, the business was organized by region, with IT resources reporting directly to regional leaders and each regional IT department autonomous in terms of IT investment and management decisions.

Six months later, the $10 billion wireless services provider, appointed a new CEO, Jaymin Patel, who began reorienting the company and its go-to-market strategy around the customer.

“As a result of our rapid regional growth, which included multiple acquisitions, Brightstar had too many applications,” says Couch. “But from the beginning, our new CEO was emphatic about his expectation in delivering value to customers through technology and innovation. This presented the perfect opportunity to reinvent IT. As a company — and as an IT organization — it became think ‘customer first’ in everything we do.”

I was talking with Dave Castellani, who as senior vice president and business information officer, runs IT for $25 billion New York Life Insurance Company, and we got onto the discussion of shadow IT. When Dave posited that CIOs would be better off “unleashing shadow IT” rather than attempting to contain it, I asked him to tell me more. Our conversation quickly became a discussion about the wholesale overhaul of the IT operating model.

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What is shadow IT?

These days, shadow IT is any activity that happens outside of the IT organization that involves coding, the purchase of a tool or equipment, or the establishment of core infrastructure. If these activities have an impact on scalability, repeatability and availability across the enterprise, they are shadow IT. This form of shadow IT needs to be controlled and contained.

Frank Modruson was a partner at Accenture for 16 years when he became CIO of Accenture for another 11 years. Since then, he has served on several corporate boards for publically traded or private companies, including First Midwest Bancorp, Forsythe Technology, LANDAUER, and Zebra Technologies.

My readership tends to be hungry for stories about CIOs on corporate boards — and Frank and I go way back — so I asked him to talk about his experience.

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What was your introduction to board experience?

Back when I was at Accenture, I was interested in getting into board work. When Accenture formed a joint venture with GE Aviation, they put together a board. I told the executives who were involved in the joint venture that I was interested in board service. One thing led to another, and I was appointed to the board where I served from 2013 to 2015. The company was Taleris, which provided predictive analytics technology to airlines and cargo carriers. During my second year on the Taleris board, I retired from Accenture and changed my resume from a CIO resume to a board resume.

Craig Richardville, chief information and analytics officer (CIAO) of Carolinas HealthCare System, one of the largest healthcare systems in the country, has been a force of innovation for many years. His IT organization has been winning awards for technology innovation since the early 2000s, and Richardville has received CIO of the Year awards from the Charlotte CIO Leadership Association, College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) and Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS).

How does Richardville and his team manage to drive innovation in an industry that has been a relative laggard in adopting new technologies?

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CIO RoleIT LeadershipHiring and StaffingInnovationDigital TransformationHow to ensure IT works on the right projectsWed, 29 Nov 2017 03:15:00 -0800Martha HellerMartha Heller

When your company makes a major acquisition and the demand on IT increases, how do you know that you are spending your precious IT dollars on the most important projects? That’s what I asked Dave Hudson, CIO of Veritiv, the $8 billion packaging, facility solutions, print and publishing, and logistics company. Hudson says a combination of vision, goals and governance is the key.

How do you turn IT from a culture of order takers to business partners?

Sometimes I find there are a few incorrect assumptions in the industry about how well IT knows the business. My IT team needs to know our business as well or better than some of our business people do. IT’s job is to take all of these fuzzy processes and make them work. To do that properly, you need some deep business process knowledge.